-Neither the last few causes alone nor the first few causes alone can produce the experience.

-These causes, that are separated by a significant amount of time, say 20 milliseconds, must relate to eachother.

-They must relate to eachother because if the first causes are X and the last causes are Y, this seems to produce another experience than if the first are Z and the latter Y, or the first X and the latter Z.

-HOW THE FUCK DO THEY RELATE.

-Remember, we already stipulated that the first and last causal event was separated by a significant amount of time.

------ the earlier causes most likely store information (that lasts atleast 20 ms) that is used by the later causes to create the experience. What else?

If the brain first does this physical thing, and then turns around completely and does another physical thing, how can the two possibly relate?

Let me put it in an extreme way. Suppose that the brain is in some resting state 0, and then goes on some spree of activity, and then returns to 0 and goes on another spree of activity.

What I don't understand, given this, is how a consciousness experience that includes both the first and second spree of activity can relate.

How can this possibly integrate, when they are separated by such a void? Causality is not transparent. There is no physical way a system can "reach" beyond such a point and figure out what was going on.

How can the historical fact that the brain processes did this or that, affect what you are experiencing now? I mean, while the current state is the same, it seems that the conscious experience can be different, depending on what happened say, 50 milliseconds ago.

But if he physical state is currently identical, there is no way to read out of the current state which conscious experience it is, because it depends on things that no longer exist O_O

Since "Emotions" are really nothing more than different hormone levels (eg endorphines get released to make you feel happy) i imagine the brain stores these "parameters" in a certain way and simply proceeds based on what the last known data was.

Imagine if you are actually a shape shifting creature that sees itself from the 3rd person, which is trapped in a box, and in that box is something called 'vision', 'hearing', etc. Then someone opens the box and you come out, and find yourself in some fucked up dimension where everything works differently, and the box was actually a form of virtual reality for the fucked up shapeshifter race that you are part of ;) (btw, the shapeshifter would be your thoughts). Its a weird thought isn't it! And you can't prove its wrong or right either, since the brain could just be part of the whole illusion.

Not that I think its not worth researching the brain and mind, I just like those mindfuck things ;)

So I am thought. Thought is trapped in 'vision', 'hearing' etc. that give it boundaries, like we experience boundaries in videogames. So then what happens is someone lifts you out of the constraints of "perception" in general? Sounds more far out than a DMT trip! :D

I love these things too. It's not really about being right or wrong. It's like thinking about time travel. Exploring the limits of what makes sense within certain assumptions and rules. But science is so sci-fi atm that you often get far just by thinking about things that, at least apparently, seem possible.

For instance, with increasing possibility that we can have our own thoughts projected on to a screen in front of us, how can we exploit this feedback to create loops? For instance, if the screen in front of me displays red whenever I think about blue, and blue whenever I think about red, how quickly would the screen oscillate between the two?

I have a feeling that a much more interesting experiment can be done with that simple kind of technology, but I haven't thought of any yet. Anyone?

Basically, in that idea, everything thats in your mind is made out of whatever the 'real' dimension is made out of, ie, something different to atoms.

Because the box exists in a place where things work completely differently to this universe, anything can happen which wouldn't be normal in this universe.

So time can work in a non-linear way, shapes can have more than 3 dimensions, etc. (anything goes really).

So I can't explain how it would interface with you, or what thoughts are made of, etc. Its like if you saw in black and white, trying to imagine what seeing in colour is like.

Its just a way of 'noticing' that we all live in some strange place, which we don't really know much about. I mean, what exactly separates your vision from your thoughts? Its not like a wall... it just 'is' separate. Yet, if you have a dream, you see things, but your eyes are shut. How'd you know if you ever open them, or if its just the scene changing Oo

Its like that double slit experiment, where when consciousness observes a photon, it acts like a particle, yet when its not observed, it acts as a wave.

In that box idea, the reason why consciousness would see a particle, is because non-linear time would be filtered into linear time, because if it wasn't, you'd be able to see yourself getting in the box in the past, and see yourself getting out afterwards, and every single possibility in the whole future and past of the universe. So to preserve the illusion, you'd have to be busted down to a linear view of things. However, that wouldn't stop the fact that in the background, everything is working in a non-linear way. In other words, if its true, they just said 'fuck it, lets leave them scratching their heads, we can't stop this phenomenon". XD

Well it was fun writing that... ;)
Sorry can't think of any good experiments.

Western civilization is shrouded in these myths and legends. We have this idea of "the light" and the "shadow world."

Maybe it is childish, but this insanity has a good scientific track record. Time and again we prove that what we took to be objective was a shallow illusion.

Scott Aaronson said recently that quantum physics really wasn't that hard; if one just removed all the physics! As he saw it quantum mechanics was really just a generalization of probability (to include minus signs) - everything else followed from there!

Whatever that means! Anyway, I was thinking the today about time travel thought experiments, and I wondered the following: Is time travel impossible because it is illogical, or is it illogical because it is impossible?

In some sense it seems to be the former. Given that we have the right logic, so many things follow. And if physics is turning into mathematics, and physical mathematics is turning into information theory..

But I mean. Since I was young i've realized how non-physical the reasoning of Einstein was. He realized some deep logical truths about how the physical world had to be. He reasoned in much the same way you do now.

The "because if it wasn't, you'd be able to" is a timeless classic. "It has to be this way, because if it wasn't, observe --> paradox" And then if the paradox is a logical paradox, you have a pretty good case! :D

The clearest way to put it is perhaps that the confusion boils down to the following premises:

Premise 0: A single unified piece of conscious experience is produced by a neural process taking some time.

Premise 1: The present conscious state would have been different if the past 100 ms had been different physically.

Premise 2: The present physical state need not be different if the last 100 ms had been different physically.

Thus, the present physical state does not uniquely determine the present conscious experience that is happening at "the same moment".

PS:

My confusion is drifting towards the following question; exactly when the fuck is the conscious experience happening?

It certainly does not float above each neuron. Neither does it float above the brain in an instant, as a conscious frozen brain is absurd. But then we are left with the option that the conscious experience does not really happen in physical time at all, but arises out of it?

If we made an artificial brain the size of earth with connections going at the speed of light, would a conscious moment only arise out of several minutes of laborious crisscrossing connections?

ur consciousness is the result of the processing of the sum of all the signals u get from ur senses and the data stored in ur memory, or it could just be the perception of signals send to ur soul. No matter how u think it, I find nothing confusing. It’s all in our brain. Actually the world we live in could be just a dream. That, I find interesting and thought provoking and not the experience of consciousness, after being unconscious (actually, u made me search in an attempt to understand ur thoughts :p. I might still be out of subject though, since even though I really respect ur mind and thinking, sometimes I have trouble understanding u).

I think many people really won't shit bricks even when they see it. The points is just along these lines: If consciousness is just information processing as we suppose now, then it seems to follow that the single experience of "red" can be computed in a distributed fashion across eons of time, and still lead to the same experience.

It doesn't matter if it's not linear or not in general, I only need the assumption that some of the pieces of the process that are relevant to consciousness occur later than some of the others.

I am really committed to physicalism as a way to understand consciousness, but i'm really having a hard time squaring it with how the experience of consciousness seems to me on reflection.

The problem is that the present state of the physical system cannot possibly determine the consciousness at that moment.

The consciousness at that moment is unique. It consists of say, the last 100 ms of things that happened in the brain. But the physical state does not consists of the last 100 ms of things that happened in the brain.

The physical state is compatible with other things having happened in that 100 ms interval. One cannot read of the physical state alone what happened in the last 100 ms. The conscious experience, on the other hand, seems to contain this information.

The conscious state would have been different if the past 100 ms had been different. The physical state need not be different if the last 100 ms had been different.

I'm pretty sure my argument leads to some strange stuff given the assumptions I have. I'm just not exactly sure at what point my assumptions go wrong, or what could possibly remedy it.

You keep speaking in terms of "the last x" denominations, but this is more of a computer concept, rather than an actual way that the brain handles information. Much the same way, people keep trying to understand eyes in terms of computers, with the idea that it works in terms of a refresh rate - however, in practice, this does not seem to be the way that the eyes work at all.

Consciousness is merely a consequence of a system that evaluates new information against old information. Even when you are unconscious, your brain still processes signals. You seem to be thinking of unconsciousness as something that would actually be comatose/brain-death.

We've still only scratched the surface of our understanding of the brain. I don't think physics would be the right field to analyze the situation, since there's still so much that we don't know to begin with.

You say that with such ease. To me that's an amazing thing. Even since I was a little child i've had a very vivid sense of the newtonian worldview, with atoms floating around in the void. It is all very dramatic with all these new phenomena to be explained :D

Well, as far as physics goes, it's simply the wrong tool for the job. It's never a good idea to do science with a preconceived conclusion, and the human body has so far proven to be extremely counter-intuitive.

Yeah you have to be careful in these debates. half the people eager about consciousness are happy wallowing in mysticism. styling at the the big bang sayin' god did it. big time chime in with the quacks to keep their hood cool; thayr minds ungraven by encumbering truthz x)

Tbh, if you want a serious conversation about it, go to some neuroscience forum, ask questions there, I don't think anyone on ESR is a neuro scientist, so you're not gonna get far.

Having said that, even neuro scientists don't understand much about how consciousness works. But you seem to be starting from an arbitrary point - you need to know enough about the brain to even begin to theorise how consciousness might work.

Btw, something to do with your time thing, I read that the brain buffers information and assembles it as a package, so what you are seeing is actually the past. Not by much, though. Consciousness is probably just the receiver of that package, it doesn't really do anything except decide on choices presented to it by the brain. So if a ball is flying towards you, your brain processes some choices, like catch the ball or duck. The conscious part of you then basically picks one, then the brain does all the calculations if you decide to catch it. So maybe you could say that consciousness is just like a program which runs, and it doesn't do anything that complex by itself, so it doesn't need to change over time, that can be left to the brain. It could just be the point where the brain goes "right I got all these things lined up I could do, now I need to decide", and it dumps it all at the point we call consciousness, in that case you could call consciousness the 'deciding observer', the rest of the stuff happens in your sub-conscious.

I don't know how that would work physically (thats the big mystery), but I think its the general idea.

"brain buffers information and assembles it as a package, so what you are seeing is actually the past"

Haha yes! That's very true. I actually observe this in myself sometimes. When I have the micro oven going, I am sometimes so deep in my interests that I don't notice the loud alarm telling me it's done. But then often, like 20 seconds later, I will literally hear the "ding!" while simultaneously knowing that it happened some time ago, as if the sound had been cued up only to ring like an echo in my ear when the time is right :D

I think deep non-technical questions like this that everyone can understand is important too. Maybe some of the assumptions we make about the world are wrong. This is not easy to discover unless we push our imaginations. It is when we push our common agreed upon principles to the limit that we can find experiments that reveal where contradictions and problems may arise.

Yeah, that might be an extreme example of it :D Or like when people get frozen when a car is coming towards them, and its all happening in slow motion, the subconscious is probably so busy trying to work out what to do, its not really presenting any choices, so the conscious part of you is just waiting, because on its own its a dumbass Oo

The slow motion thing is probably a bit like a shutter speed, its taking in a load more information than normal, so you get more 'frames' and it probably runs at the same "FPS" as normal, so it looks like slow motion (shit description but roughly makes sense).

Mostly though I think its a tiny amount of time, I don't know how much, but way way less than a second.

I remember running 60m in highschool. I've always had a very good ability to summon my all in such situations. But I hadn't been running for a few years, and I remember feeling stuck in my own body. It was as if my consciousness was all alive saying "go!!" and nothing would happen. I was running as fast as I could, but it felt slow and I desperately tried to carry my legs faster. Like when you feel you are breathing manually, you almost feel like you are breathing, but you're not really sure, and it just clutters up the process anyway.

Our consciousness is not aware of much of what we experience, which is what the subconscious handles. He seems to take issue with the idea that without consciousness, the body can't understand that it isn't conscious.

maybe the general term "unconscious" is misleading or just hard to get, since it does mean no action is happening, neither in the consciousness or in the subconsciousness (actually there is no distinction between sub- and unconsciousness in german, aswell)

if you would get knocked out again before the crucial "last events" happen, all the information about seeing him smile would be gone. resetting like a buffer.

i remember :D a situation where i was full on mushrooms like 10 years ago and got punched in the face 3 times(near temple/eyebrow), which each presumably led to some nano-blackouts. all i can remember is looking angry in his equally angry face and being pulled away by a friend, no fist or pain or whatever, just felt it bleeding some minutes later.

after reading #10 i see you actually mean something else.

i would say the physical process of reading this and converting it to an experience, merge it with others and therefor bring it into consciousness/dump it in the unconsciousness takes some time. so i wouldn't say it is really the last 100ms more like what happened some ms ago with some gap. or am i missing something?

not sure how you differentiate a conscious state and a physical state, since i see the physical state just as the milk man for your consciousness. help me out.

and what do you mean with the difference of" if the past 100 ms had been different" exactly?

I will supplement this last argument I gave a bit, and then go to bed. Final version, Hnyaa! ^^

Argument

Premise 0: A single unified piece of conscious experience is produced by a neural process taking some time.

Premise 1: The present conscious state would have been different if the past 100 ms had been different physically.

Premise 2: The present physical state need not be different if the last 100 ms had been different physically.

Thus, the present physical state does not uniquely determine the present conscious experience that is happening at "the same moment".

Supplement

- The conscious state does not seem to happen "in" time, but rather arises out of it.

- Premise 1: Example of last 100 ms being different physically:

If some neurons had fired in a different order than they did, if the signal had traveled a different route, etc.

- Premise 2: Example of the present physical state being the same even if the past physical state is different:

In 100 ms a lot can happen. Neurons fire, signals travel in this or that specific path. In one instance, the signal travels one way. In another instance the signal travels another way. Suppose that this difference is undetectable at the end - at the present physical state. Then there are two possible different histories that the present physical state can have. One where the signal goes this way. Another where the signal can go that way.

interesting. so it could be that with repeating the process from physical state to consciousness, there will be "chosen" a different path which will be different or even optimised, through let's say touching different parts of the subconsciousness?

sounds reasonable, since repetition of situations, as long as they're out of the consciousness, sometimes lead to new insights (or insanity).

i thought you were talking about that :D (like with different physical state histories, "HOW DO THEY RELATE?")

imagine you get the task to paint a picture of your birthplace.

in the physical process of getting stored images into consciousness out of your memory or the subconsciousness a path is chosen which will trigger some of these images.

five minutes later you get the same task and chances are the picture will be similar to your first, and you can build it up pretty fast, since the route of the physical process will be "known" and therefor similar.

one year later you will get the same task again, and the time you need to come up with ideas will be as long as the first time you had to draw it. but chances are other parts of your brain will be triggered leading to crucial differences in the picture.

Ah.. I think I see what you mean. The last part is assumption 1: that you can have a different quality of experience by changing the physical path. The first part of what you wrote is an assumption that you can have the same quality of experience by changing (e.g. optimizing) the path taken. This latter assumption is likely true also.

But the argument was for something stranger. My conclusion is formulated rather clumsily.

I think the conclusions is something to the effect that consciousness does not exist in physical time; neither does it occur in physical space.

This is because the conscious experience is the result of the joint operation of the whole spatiotemporal process that creates it.

It's like, when I read the word "process" i can't remove any part of it and still have it appear to me as "process." The disanalogy is this: with language, it is decompositional, so you can read "p" "pro" "process" and "ce" alone and so on.

But in our consciousness argument we supposed the minimum amount of process that made anything appear, i.e. come to consciousness. And so it makes no sense to speak of components that can appear sequentially or isolated, as with the word-case above.

A good example is perhaps the minimum process required for us to see the color red. Lets say the brain is the size of the galaxy, and to see red it has to send signals between like, 10 solar systems. And so it takes say, 200 000 years for this to happen, and so where was red? When was red?

i think my conclusion isn't that irrelevant for your arguments, but to me it would explain something like creativity. as someone who just isn't or barely has new ideas, will most likely have a constant and faster access to his stored information, with no way of easily resetting this route. opposed to a child which has difficulties to get something into consciousness and hold it.

and the minimum of taken processes will depend on these routes and some kind of border between the sub and the consciousness which won't let it pass and give you a "proce".

Definitively. I've tried to think of some conclusions like that myself. It seems that there must be some consequences like that. After all, consciousness must have some interesting effects that benefit us as we think and navigate the world. That's where things get really tricky, and a proper positive theory of consciousness would help us immensely :D

about the time factor...
in general chemical energy is somewhat slow.
For instance a battery holds quite a lot of power but it gets extracted fairly slow.
So before all charge has gotten from one place to another will take time.

yes, quite slow! so if you hear and see something, and these things are united in experience, it means different parts of your brain doing stuff at different times give rise to one unitary experience that feel absolutely indivisible. :D

-Consciousness arises out of the complicated causal events that occur in the brain as a result of neurons firing.

Where do you base that assumption on? Maybe the information is processed unconsciously and it gets conscious just by focusing your attention on it. Being knocked out doesn't mean that your brain is "frozen".

Depends on how you define "conscious" and "unconscious" which is what OP is very vague with. Like many things regarding the human brain, what consciousness is and how it is produced is still unsolved. It could even be only a by-product of brain activity and maybe there are different layers of consciousness; e.g. animals could be consciously aware of objects in their physical surrounding but humans can also be aware of inner processes. In any case, experiments showed some interesting things, for example in tests people made decisions or recognized errors (in their decisions) before being aware of it.

with access i actually mean to "actively attending" to "it", like focussing on a number and combine (actively process) it with another.

it's all very vague to distinguish a process, an access or whatever in all the 3 categories (active - passive).

can't deny i'm rather clueless aswell, but just trying to use it for my own purposes and making things up for fun/out of interest. i don't feel that you can't discus it, just because it's not "solved", yet. it's more the opposite to me. i'm gonna lose interest if someone solved the puzzle.

with access i actually mean to "actively attending" to "it", like focussing on a number and combine (actively process) it with another.

That sounds more like working memory, though I'm not sure if one can be conscious if he lacks a working memory (e.g. due brain damage). Anyway what I meant with my prior post was that our behavior/attitude/mood/etc gets influenced by stimuli without us being aware of it. For example, in a common test people are shown some abstract pattern repeatedly for such a short time that they can't remember having seen that pattern afterwards. Still, when rating how much they like it, compared to other similar abstract patterns they rate it higher. That's called the "mere exposure" effect and is one example of what can't be explained with your model.

in my rough "model", it actually would be the subconsciousness. " the pure storage of information gained by any perception".

it is always intertwined with memory, since we're talking about all kinds of information and its storage, etc..
i guess you have to differentiate what kind of brain damage, maybe there is some kind of data header, which is needed in order to "translate" the information into the consciousness.

You don't think it's fair to assume that a frozen brain is unconscious?

This thread is about revealing inconsistencies by assuming uncontroversial stuff. If I am "making things up" then apparently i'm not in tune with your intuition about how things are.

I'm not motivated to come on a forum and start convincing people by appealing to facts that they cannot check without huge investment. I tried linking tons of interesting new findings a while back, but then it's just spreading information. There's no debate in that.

Here I attempt to reveal how ordinary assumptions together lead to contradictions or paradox. Most of us can use common sense to entertain complex issues without going into detail.

For instance, you don't need to be a scientist or know any special facts to see that newtonian science doesn't square with speed of light being the same for all observers. Such paradoxes are fun and obvious for anyone who entertains it.

Yes it can be entertaining to speculate about things, but it doesn't lead anywhere. Interesting new findings as you call them always result in debate, nothing get's just accepted as "the truth". That's the only valid way to hypothesize, critical and based on as many facts as possible.

for an individual the state of "not-knowing" is much more potent than his opposite. especially nowadays in the age of information, where access to information is everywhere, any time and always appreciated as at least temporary "truth", a more critical examination of the states of knowing and not-knowing is needed.

it is not desirable to remain in silence until a certain truth that is based on facts will lead to a compromise, since that actually means even less to nothing.

speculation, as you call it with a negative undertone, is mostly based on facts or the general function of words. it is also crucial for progression, since it's not about getting exciting to spot a dead end, it's about creating a vague carcass with help of the "entertainment" of possibilities, which will lead to progression be it in personal or general favor. (i.e. "doesn't lead anywhere" opposed to "interesting, let's try to get more information about it")

it is not desirable to remain in silence until a certain truth that is based on facts will lead to a compromise, since that actually means even less to nothing.

There is no "truth" in science. You can gather strong evidence for a theory, but you can never prove it. Yet, a single disproof renders the theory invalid.

speculation, as you call it with a negative undertone, is mostly based on facts or the general function of words.

It is based on facts and observations. I don't see facts in this thread and the observations don't seem very reliable either. When was the last time that you got knocked out? Do you remember what your first perception was then? How can you be sure that your memory isn't impaired? I mean after all there is evidence that high levels of stress can impair episodic memory. Sure, if you speculate out of the blue there are no limits, no borders. But chances are very low that you discover the "truth" among those endless possibilities.

that's why i called it a temporary, certain truth, even put it into exclamation marks :/

facts, in this case, mean basic things like there are neurons in our brain and that we have different states of consciousness, etc.. simple things like that, you won't get anything else. the thing is scientists in this fields don't have much more either (ofc except for scientific tools). yes, it takes a great amount of abstraction to understand and articulate processes, which aren't properly named, yet, but it isn't out of the blue at all.

when did the last time got something into your consciousness? now. that's all i need to start thinking. but we should talk about something different, not debating on principles i don't care for.

Sure let's be arrogant and ignore 50 years of neuroscience, and cognitive & behavioral psychology. Let's start from scratch and ignore all existing findings and theories because we are smarter than all those people who dedicated their life to science.

Nothing wrong with discussing the philosophy of things imo, but when it comes down to concrete processes I can't see how existing facts can be ignored in a reasonable discussion. That's like we gonna explain how a computer works now: "There is electricity inside and you can turn it on and off, that's all that humankind knows about computers, let's start from there!".

thanks for twisting my words. i'm actually just ignoring your style of proceeding the issue, not any facts. you don't enjoy or find it meaningful to think about an unsolved issue. therefor the real indication of your presence here gets obvious and it's not something i really care for.

there are tons of different approaches to solve this puzzle, years of work gets nullified all the time and therefor the whole debate is speculative by itself and accessable as something that is up for ideas.
we're not gonna find a solution for the understanding of consciousness in here.lol. and what i try to tell you since a few posts is that this shouldn't be the point at all, the ability to move in a territory without knowledge is flawed these days.

there are tons of different approaches to solve this puzzle, years of work gets nullified all the time and therefor the whole debate is speculative by itself and accessable as something that is up for ideas.

you don't enjoy or find it meaningful to think about an unsolved issue. therefor the real indication of your presence here gets obvious and it's not something i really care for.

Well either I'm a troll or you really fail to understand the basics of science. There're multiple possibilities even in this simple case. It's a nice example on how reasoning without foundation can lead to seemingly satisfying but wrong conclusions. To be honest the problem with you and clains is, you don't have a clue that you don't have a clue. Grab a book about neuroscience and learn the basics, then you will realize that statements as "basic things like there are neurons" don't make sense. What you're trying to do is to solve a equation without knowing the symbols.

do you really think that i have problems to understand your pretty standard bullshit of how to treat a scientific problem? why don't you read a book about the neural correlates of consciousness and you gonna rule the thread with cool facts.

means that even the fundamentals are often based on speculative assumptions. i'm curious about this circumstances, that's why i'm talking here.

there is no problem with "me and clains", don't know why you talk about "us". you're just a piece of shit that's all, you hopefully get rid of that in your early 30s, when you found your miserable place in your society. who cares now or ever.

by the age of 13 i actually discovered some specific circumstance of the "corona" of a firefly, i even got a price for that. now i'm doing scientific researches in a not so scientific field, so it's actually not the traditional sense of research. you're still trying to tell me how i should do things. that's not funny at all. better get rid of that general jealousy about everything and everyone, i might gonna lose my arrogance.

what you describe as 'consciousness' is
a) an effect of language (being able to relate and 'play' with past and fictional events, being self-aware in distinction of your environment, be it human or not)
b) the fact that you are awake (being conscious).

getting knocked out puts you to sleep, but it has nothing to do with having a consciousness. our brains store memories, those do not disappear when not being awake either.

I think you view things differently, but I can't tell in exactly what way from what you've written. Perhaps it will be more clear if you point to the steps in the updated argument that it affects?

Other than that i'm confused why getting knocked out has nothing to do with consciousness. I suppose you mean this in the "a)" sense? But didn't my argument suppose the "a)" sense all along?

When I talk about the past, i'm referring not to distant memories, but to the kind of reaching back that happens on the order of 100 milliseconds when for instance you feel a pain. The way the brain produces this unity of experience, and the time that it takes.

right now i'm stoned and unable to coherently put thoughts together, so this will have to do :p

i was refering to

Consciousness arises out of the complicated causal events that occur in the brain as a result of neurons firing.

and was under the impression you view a) as a result of this, hence the following confusion of terms... actually, i'm still under that impression.

what i meant was this: a) is the result of an thought process (and therefore rather independent in itself and stored as such in memory) and is not causally determined by ongoing physical processes, or their observation.

exactly my friend. now i take physicalism to be reductionistic, but of course this is a semantic issue. if science expands to include physical states that are 'accumulative' based on past or external events, then of course it will be physical, but this is what is in question. at least on my intuition, this is a big step for physicalism.

for what is interesting is that you must still allow some sense in which two states can be identical in the here or now, but differ in meaning as the past or future, or even things external to the (isolated) state differ. like a word in a sentence having different meaning as per what happened in the rest of the sentence spatially/temporally.

no, and it's not even a question in my view. its as simple as infinite number of functions diverging at infinite number of rates. even if time was reversed, they are diverging in the same direction, so they can never meet.

I'm not quite sure what you answered "no" to. That we don't have to allow a sense in which two states can be identical?

If so, I don't understand how. That is, how do these infinite functions diverging at infinite rates come in?

If i'm an electron with some history, it seems that I could be swapped for another electron in the same now-state with a different past, and so on, for they follow the same fundamental laws of physics.

Just not getting what you're saying is all. So i'll stop talking further x)

an electron is a label for something behaving according to certain properties required to define an electron. you can't 'swap' them, and even if you could, they represent different states of internal particles out of which they consist, which we can speculate affect their behavior that we only know the probabilities of. in short, there are no 'states', nothing in its entirety is 'identical'.

i don't understand why you don't understand how this is exemplified with a bunch of divergent functions? this is exactly what physics postulates, even if not using time as one of the dimensions, but as an intermediary variable, equations give increasingly complicated answers based on "history", or the input variables. as simple as possible, it is a single line(dimension), infinite number of points on which diverge. in reality, it's just way more dimensions.

Moreover the brain is a dynamic "machine" which may change constantly based on input, as for example the strength of connections in a neuronal network might be altered all the time. Even if extremely simplified there probably wont ever be two identical physical states in the brain.

I implied that he meant "physical representations" when he said " physical states", thinking of patterns of activation within a neural network. But I can't really conclude from his posts what he means with his wording.

I don't see why we could not swap electrons. The theory is at a functional level. The electrons are real instantiated properties that we can move around.

Lets say we can swap them, as you assume for the sake of argument, then you say, "they represent different states of internal particles out of which they consist, which we can speculate affect their behavior that we only know the probabilities of."

Are you saying here that their difference would amount to a difference in the internal character of the electron?

The point here was that we could swap the whole brain, atom by atom, electron by electron, and so on. Given this, on your view you need to "save" some information that will make the one state different from the other, although they - to all appearances - seem identical.

I mean, as i've understood your position, you have two arguments. The one is the one above, to claim that the electrons and atoms in themselves are really never identical. Or you could claim that their state (spin, velocity, acceleration etc.) are not identical.

In the latter case you could conceivably retrieve some information about the past of the particle. However, since physics is discrete I think this would be very limited.

In the first case, I think it's very speculative, and I don't see how this could be a simple point at all.

---- thinking more

If it's like a chaos theory equation running, specifying a lot of points, say which neurons to fire when, then there would be a sense in which the function governing the whole specifies a certain number of states, and you could trace back the state by knowing the function for the whole.

But this assumes a function for the whole. But this is just what is in question. We know that consciousness is unitary, but we have no formal function to specify it as a function of a statecomplex and its dynamic interactions. If we suppose such a function, then we have already assumed an important ontological category that hasn't really existed in physics until now. And that's the kind of conclusion that I find interesting.

"in themselves" and "state" are inter-dependent properties. the idea of a "state" also assumes certain quanta, it is inherently a fictional simplification, only useful in electromagnetism.

in reality, you can't swap anything in the universe as it is an inseparable consequence of the 'history'. the moment you assume that you can, "for the sake of the argument", at best you are talking nonsense, a universe in which anything is possible. unless you are practicing a cargo cult science, you need to understand which aspects of the brain, down to plank scale, and beyond, are relevant, and then you can begin to isolate the functionality of consciousness.

"you can't swap anything in the universe as it is an inseparable consequence of the 'history'."

I'm not sure that's a common premise. Certainly not in the realm of specific theories. If we want a theory of consciousness we want to specify the relevant grain of sand at which to analyze it. It is not obvious that *nothing* can be switched.

My intuition (may be wrong) is that, below a certain level, it wouldn't make a difference if we switched material, say quarks or whatever. The same is true if we go back far enough in time, it doesn't matter whether the atoms in my body came from the sun or some other star.

Essentially, these do not seem to matter to the quality of conscious experience. So why would the history suddenly matter at these specific conscious intervals of around say, 200 ms? What, exactly, is it that plays the role relevant to creating our conscious experience?

The reason we have functional theories where we can swap parts is partly because that's why theories are interesting. If we want to be able to build consciousness without replicating the whole human brain, we need to know the relevant limits within which we can swap parts and materials at will.

Theory of consciousness is exactly the theory of specify the grain of sand. It's not a logical exercise. Unfortunately we don't know what role the stars and quarks play in the formation of our conscious experience (stars make me feel good!). Between eliminating quarks, stars, and parts of our brain, there I don't see any clear distinction. I believe that makes your logical argument impossible, sorry.

Yes, it's not purely logical. But much of the advances that need to be made trade on denying some of our common assumptions. Although, after this thread i'm not so sure what, if any, are our common assumptions. So then a positive theory is in order x)

he's just trying to follow your principles of accumulation rather than his own of reduction, in contrast to your absolute judgment in post #60. i'm also not sure if can take your arguments of time, other dimensions, electron, etc. just as an issue of "complexity", that you most likely don't understand urself. care to elaborate a little bit further?

also, i doubt that different approaches as well as different theories would negate each on this topic in general, just in the details.

if one were to follow 'accumulation', which is not my principle, but observed nature of the universe in terms of thermodynamics, one would arrive with exactly what I state, so I'm not sure what your point is. what exactly should I elaborate on, physics? it's a bunch of equations.

and I don't see a difference between 'in general' and 'in details', as long as two theories conflict, one of them is wrong.

so for you it's really just about the complexity, which at this point in time we're just not able to rationalize and determine which theory is "wrong".

guess there is some sort of saying i'm not aware of, something with being aware of time, being afraid of stating a theory that isn't absolutely right forever and yearn for a "physics quality" in every argument without having the capability to do yourself. like a critic saying that a culture work can't be absolute, so all the work is wrong. for me that's a horrible way to go, but it seems that most of the people become an observer of all tomorrow's parties all they get input about and feel the need to graduate in a "judiciary" position.

or am i wrong (and i know you want to tell me)and you're giving multiple views based on different branches at least a chance in this debate?

"multiple views based on different branches" get a chance if they explain the observed nature of things, and as Demiurge pointed out, Clains theory fails to do so. A valid theory should explain observations on every level, if it fails to it must be discarded or expanded. So if you question the current view on the nature of the universe without having evidence that could render this theory wrong, no one gives a fuck.

wasn't about clains' theory, it was explicit about the standpoint of demiurge. as i said the post before, clains is open to accept another theory and links it to another or his own.

"valid theory should explain observations on every level" ofc this should be the goal, but especially on this topic there are theories which seem to be completely detached from the others (i.e. the issue of post#60). to me that would lead to a attenuation of a theory to pure opinions and arguments, which hardly can be categorized into "right" or "wrong"

if you are right, and you could be right, we should discuss why the god chose the blue pallet, if that means the redshift is just smearing, and the universe isn't full of unidentified junk that he left behind. the implications of this hypo-universe are truly enormous.

i am the big demiurge. i don't have to argue with anyone or dispute anyone, they are just irrelevant. what I'm directly observing is what matters. what i state is proven and correct, there will be no point in discussing it further.
i avoid stating anything speculative, since then my forum warrior credibility will vanish and everyone will see that all i have to say is that what other people found out. i prefer the methods of prove other people wrong instead. call me when you find the truth, because then i have to say a lot.

i am little yank3, i can't tell when people are trolling and i like to talk speculative nonsense which shows that i can't even be discrete about the logical consistency of thoughts inside my head! when other people don't spout speculative nonsense like me, they are obviously just concerned about their forum credo, which everyone finds very important! my thoughts are original and unthought by generations that came before me, therefore i am a discoverer of things! haha!

so "like saying all work is wrong" is like saying a certain premise is wrong. good to know.

what chance? i already gave a chance one of the premises, and it's not compatible with the current view of the universe. if you'd like to continue with anything based on that premise, you're a cargo cultist.

Well, I just finished trying to interpret Demiurge's comment, but he says this at one point; "in short, there are no 'states', nothing in its entirety is 'identical'."

There really is a lot of different things going on here.

On basic intuition it seems that we can swap one electron for another, and perhaps one neuron for another within a system. As long as the parts are functionally equal, the "machine" should be identical.

In the case of consciousness, it seems we cannot go as far as we want with this. For instance, we cannot simple swap one present state with history x for a present state with history y in the normal way.

This is Because consciousness is something building up within a certain timeperiod, and any single present state-specification does not seem sufficient for the functional role to get going.

The final question presents itself like this: What are the functionally relevant aspects of the brain that contribute to consciousness?

To my intuition this is quite strange, that we cannot swap one functionally identical system for another.

Say processes are going on to bring pain to awareness. Suppose that midway through the underlying process causing this pain, someone activated devices in some neurons that disable those neurons while still sending the signals to the exact places they would have gone.

On the normal story, and the one my intuition is still along with, this would still lead to an experience of pain. On this new story, this can break the experience.

if it can break the experience, then of course this means that the devices are not identical to neurons, or the signal they took in are not transduced in the right way. The big question is to specify what this something is.

It does not seem to be functional equivalence as to input and output of the neuron. For if we blackbox the neuron, the input and output are the same.

Thus, given our assumption that this breaks the experience, I see three possibilities; the something that breaks experience is either in the neuron, in the signal coming towards the neuron, or the potential of the neuron that make a difference.

If it's in the neuron, then how can it not be about functional equivalence? The neuron only seems to have one job in this instance, to get the signal from here to there.

If it's in the signal, how can the difference between the two signals matter other than functionally? To the extent that physics allow it, we can assume that they are identical.

And finally, if it's about the potential action of the neuron, and thus possible paths of the signal, then the various possibilities of the system that are not actually realized play a role functionally.

A widely cited approach to the problem of consciousness takes this last approach. It simply expands the notion of "function" to include the potential actions of say, a neuron, in the story of what actually happens globally. (On this theory, the unrealized states of a system contribute to the realized states)

in artificial and abstract exercise, your options make sense, in reality you seem to be ignoring neuron interacting in other way than electricity including in time itself. if you could isolate a neurons functionality, you don't know down to what scale you would be isolating it to, and what the purpose of the exercise would be if it were identical. the search for this limit is a great quest. I welcome you becoming a neuroscientist.

Yes, "two identical physical states can be implicated in different minimal conscious experiences" can be taken to mean that two identical electrons can be implicated in different minimal conscious experience, which is rather obvious and trivial.

What I meant to say, should have said, is that a time slice of the process that gives rise to minimal conscious experience, can be identical, while their associated conscious experience are different.

It's not really that much harder to accept stated in this way, maybe, but with the ideas that the past states affect this present time slice, things get interesting.

time slice of the process that gives rise to minimal conscious experience, can be identical, while their associated conscious experience are different.

It is not possible to produce two processes with identical what you call "time slices" (otherwise, they would occur at the same place at the same time and be therefore same process).
Also, you are not taking in account that "conscious experience" is a function not only of external stimulus but also of the brain itself that processes it, and brain constantly changes due to acquisition of new memories, so no matter what external phenomena are, they would always produce different conscious experiences just because the brain that produces them is not the same at any two moments of time.

For the sake of assumption my friend. Say you are watching a quake demo and by some freak accident all the timings and items and position of the players and weapon out etc. are identical down to the finest grain at 13:37 into the game (timelimit 15) as it was in another demo at 13:37. In this sense the two situations would be identical for the relevant ingame physics.

There's nothing mysterious about using the notion of an "identical" state that occurs in a different time at another place. Physics assumes, as far as i understand, that an experiment done here and now, will have the same effect as one done tomorrow and elsewhere, all else being equal.

In any case, I don't see why that should be the controversial step. If you assume that a physical state X cannot possibly be identical with a physical state Y, just in virtue of its being numerically different (e.g. in another time or place), then this needs some qualification i think?

The fact that "same" states are actually always at least slightly different is not my point.
My point is that conscious experience is not generated by a physical state, it is generated by a brain which is processing stimuli created by that state, and brain is never constant, it always changes with time, so it is no surprise at all that two same states can produce different experiences because those states must occur at different times, so two experiences are generated by, so to say, two different brains.
Basically, statement from your post is very trivial and it is not controversial or surprising at all, it is obvious and uninteresting consequence of the fact that brain constantly accumulates new memories.

the first claim is nontrivial. in what exact way is consciousness not generated by a physical state? we know that the brain exists at least with the help of physical states, so what is the relation?

the second claim cries for an explanation of how new memories accumulate. if we assume, as we did, that the physical states are identical, then in what are these memories stored?

the problem is this: the states are identical, but the information is different. as you say, since it's not a physical difference, it must be some other difference. but where, and in what?

it's not explanation to say that the information that are different are "memories," for this just begs the question. the question is, if the physical state of the system is identical, how can the memory be different?

When I say "state" I don't include brain itself in it, i.e. I look at this situation as if we have physical state and brain as some machine that "looks" at this state and creates conscious experience. Of course, brain is a physical state itself, so of course you can combine brain and its surroundings in one big physical state, it's only a matter of terminology. If you combine everything in one state, then you can just look at it as a union of two sub-states, one of which is brain, and another is everything that is external to the brain.
Now back to your argument:

Premise 0: A minimal conscious experience cannot be decomposed.

Okay.

Premise 1: A minimal conscious experience is produced by a physical process taking some time.

Okay.

Premise 2: Two identical physical states can have a different past.

Okay.

A) From 0, 1 and 2: No present state of a physical system is alone sufficient to determine a minimal conscious experience.

Not okay. Nothing prevents history to be encoded within state itself (like brain encodes [some] history of its inputs in memory). So a singe momentary state can have information about previous time interval and is perfectly capable of generating conscious experience based on process that took some time.

So it's all very simple. If by "state" one means input to the brain plus brain itself, then same exact brain with same exact memories stimulated by same exact inputs will produce same exact conscious experience. If by "state" one means only input to the brain, then at each time brain will have different memories and can create different experiences even when presented with same input.

We assumed that two physical states could be identical with different past. This means that the coding is not in the physical state itself.

They could be, not must be. Generally, two brains with two different histories would not be identical, they would be different states, so they would produce different conscious experiences.
If you manage to perfectly clone a brain and challenge two clones with identical inputs, they would produce identical experiences.
Also, it is not mandatory that a physical process must produce a conscious experience. Brain only produces experiences based on whatever is currently encoded in its current state. If it hasn't recorded memory of a process for whatever reason, then that process simply won't result in a conscious experience.

How can the brain be *different* is the problem. If you think it can be, then how? If you think it cannot be, which premise is wrong.

What is the problem? Acquire some memories, make some new connections between neurons or whatever, and you have a different brain with a different state.
The premise that is wrong is this:

No present state of a physical system is alone sufficient to determine a minimal conscious experience.

If present state has past events encoded in itself, then there is absolutely no problem for it to determine a conscious experience.

Actually, since it has been a while since I renewed the angle, and since you seem persistent and honest in your argumentation, let me give yet another way to look at this issue.

Think of it this way.

You are hearing 3 sounds. BOM BOM BOM.

This creates an experience of "BOM BOM BOM." Call this experience B.

Now imagine hearing DING BOM BOM.

This creates and experience of "DING BOM BOM." Call this experience D.

Now imagine the first sound happens at time1, second at time2, third at time3.

Suppose now that the physical state of the brain is completely identical for the experience D and B at time2 when both sounds that are occuring are "BOM."

If we assume that the experience is unitary and cannot be decomposed in experience, it seems that the effect of these identical states are different, (one completing the experience D and the other B) even though their difference lies in their past.

But if the physical states are identical, how does the world "remember" which state should complete which experience? All memory and coding as such metaphors appeal to physical states, bits of stored information in a hddisk and so on.

Here we assumed that the states are completely identical. Something in the past is influencing which experience is being completed now, seemingly with no physical connection to it.

Of course, when we actually experience D and B our brains will in fact be different at t2. Here I just assume, for the sake of the thought experiment, that they are identical at t2.

If you think that assumption is too strong, then you might want to insist that it's not possible to have a situation analogous to this one. Then you could just deny that the physical state is identical like demiurge did.

Notice that this last option has two plausible ways (as i see it) that it can go.

1. Either one can say that a physical state includes more than atoms, neurons, relations between them etc. in way that we do not yet understand, and thus put the memory of the past in "something else" that belongs to (but is not strictly determined by) the physical state.

2. Or you can say that the physical state is never identical even in the more limited sense of neurons, relations between them etc. because this is just how physics works as we know it atm.

Notice that accepting something like 1 is what i think is what is going to happen. There's some kind of "memory" that is not yet possible to explain without a new kind of formalism, that is either not invented yet or at the boundary of new science.

This is a thought experiment. We assume that it is, and see what happens.

But let us see why it could or couldn't be identical.

Most reasons why it couldn't be identical in this case is uninteresting; the "ding" will trigger innumerable other connections than "bom" and these changes will persists and cause even further changes down the line.

But most of these, we can suppose, have no effect on consciousness, and so doesn't really matter.

Some of them might have an effect.

Is it essential to a conscious experience that past differences have a physical representation in the present? If no, then we can disregard that they wouldn't be identical, because they could be.

If yes, then we are back to the topic of how a past events influence the present.

Now can a conscious experience make use of identical physical states in different experiences? Trivially, yes: They can make use of one electron in one experience, and then reuse an electron in the exact same state another experience.

I take that to be a trivial point, but you could object to that, but I don't know where that would lead you really.

If we go up a notch, and assume that conscious experiences can make use of "bigger" identical states, say, the time-slice of brain activity in a process leading to a conscious experience, then we are already in a similiar situation to the "bom" being common to both experiences.

Of course, "bom" might be even further up a notch than a minimal timeslice, but it serves to magnify the rather imperceptible anomaly effect to our reason.

Let us disregard the "big" physical identities then, and focus on something intermediate between an electron and a timeslice, for instance a bunch of neurons firing.

Could it be the case that a bunch of neurons fire in the same exact way in one experience, and in another experience? I see no reason why not. If the functional unit of consciousness is something like the discrete action of neurons, then this is plausible.

If, as it seems is your view, that there is something deeply infinite in grain, then this move is rather dubious. Here our intuitions split, and it is hard to get further by this type of discussion.

You would claims that the difference to consciousness of a physical system is more extremely fine-grained, such that you might not even replace neurons with neurons and still retain the same experience.

As we agreed the last time, it's very much about scale, and the relevant scale at which material differenes make functional differences to consciousness. In my intuition, we can get the thought experiments going, because i think it makes sense that the system might reuse a whole cluster of neurons in one experience.

In that case, we simply keep the neurons constant, and vary details external (in space or time) to them to get another conscious experience.

On your intuition, we might wonder what the right functional level is. To me It seems implausible that consciousness is infected by things that happened a long time ago, or on a very small scale.

This is because it seems to me that we can have experiences that are relatively similiar at different times, with different substrates. if this is true, there must be some functional specification of what matters. and i don't see why this would involve more than simple relations we can model and put in some simulation. but here i may very well be wrong :)

Then, either, it is physically identical to the other state or it is not.

If we assume that the states could be physically identical, then the coding could be non-physical in those states.

If we assume that the states could not be physically identical, then the coding could just be normal physical coding.

By physical i simply mean the intuitive specification; neurons are in this or that state, synapses are wired like this etc.

Something non-physical would be like if quantum-mechanical states encoded the information, or if there was some higher level information-property of the system that takes into account what has happened, or something like that, which we don't know if is true or not yet.

Actually, there are some clever philosophers who by some intuitions have been forced to accept a very strong view like that one.

Consider this thought experiment.

By some chance miracle, a man happens to be created by material in a swamp so as to coincide exactly with the configuration of some other man, who is alive and well with memories of his experiences etc.

So their state is identical, they have the same memories, personality, dispositions etc. only that one is created just now, and the other has lived a long life with a history of interacting with all these remembered things and so on.

Dretske (some philosopher) would accept the idea that given that this is possible, then this swamp-man would not have the associated conscious states, that the other man has. even though they are physically identical in the present, one man will be unconscious, or minimally, conscious in a different way, than the other.

Why does Dretske say this? Because swamp-man does not stand in the right relation to past incidents, his conscious experience will be nonexistant or defective.

But then of course we are in a pickle. Because the swamp man and the other man would behave, under the same conditions, in the same way. So does this mean that consciousness is without physical effects? This seems impossible. And so on and so on.

Dretske would likely say something to the effect that the thought experiment is implausible etc. and so the conclusion should be implausible. But it is strange and ... etc.

---

As I see it, the intuitions are correct, but the timescale is wrong. According to some theories, this *does* happen at some millisecond scale, but not over periods of time longer than that. This is something like the effect of einsteinian revolution, that close to the speed of light, then this crazy stuff happens, or rather, we can actually notice that it does happen. in all other cases, we can think "newtonianly" with no great loss.

this is actually an argument invented my donald davidson. he was embracing semantic externalism at the time, which has an affinity somewhat with mental content externalism that dretske promotes.

funny how you object to the thought experiment by the guy who basically invented truth functional semantics, which seems to be your favorite way of handling complexity.

or maybe you reacted to something else? surely empirically improbable has nothing to do with logical impossibility. in fact, not even physical impossibility is the same as logical impossibility.

i take it you claim that it's physically impossible? it may be. that does not help. again this is a thought experiment. you don't object to einstein by considering it foolish that it's impossible to physically sit on a beam of light. it's called *judgement*

the relevant idea was that mental content is determined by past events. dream up another more likely experiment to see when it comes in conflict with other views.

negating a microscope into our differences is just unhelpful unless you have a really good reason to reject something fundemental about the assumptions being made.

anyway, this is probably not constructive any more anyway. we are all tired and bored of this discussion by now anyway.

it's physically impossible, not just "improbable". yes, physical impossibility is the same as logical impossibility, since the physical universe behaves according to logic, otherwise known as math. no, thought experiments grounded in logically contradicting premises are not productive.

nice one, dude. you should be more aware of how you exist in a world where people have different opinions.

just to run through them quickly: many physicists accept that pretty much any state can be spontaneously created, if you wait long enough. they also reason about the consistency of alternate logically possible physical laws. and last time i checked there was a huge controversy over the relation between logic and math. (and arguments from logically contradicting premises is often used in physics, and of course proof by contradiction in mathematics. there's even a field called paraconsistent logic)

no physicist accepts that anything can be 'spontaneously created'. you misunderstand the popularized notion of quantum mechanics that uses probability, according to which there is a non-zero probability that particles can align themselves to form some arbitrary new physical object, otherwise misinterpreted as 'anything that can happen, will'. the problem is that a lot of things have zero probability of happening, so no, not everything can.

yeah, all the alternate logically possible physical laws are possible, as long as they are logical. that's how theories exist. what's your point?

there is no controversy over the relation between logic and math. there is a controversy with people using non-formal logic to make other people disprove their nonsense and people using words "paraconsistent" and "logic" in the same sentence.

if you got the relation between logic, math and physics sorted, there might be a nobel prize waiting, so go ahead and publish.

that issue aside, i'm pretty sure that i've heard high level physicists talk as if there's a non-zero chance of any non-contradictory physical state arising. I don't see why that one in particular would be logically impossible.

i'm not a physicist, so i relate to the ideas that come to me by investigating the subject by looking at lectures and reading popular articles. it's just silly to accuse me of not knowing what a quantum state is.

"yeah, all the alternate logically possible physical laws are possible, as long as they are logical. that's how theories exist. what's your point?"

my point was that the physical laws that are logically possible may be physically impossible, simply because physics doesn't allow them. it could well turn out that physics simply is, with no logical explanation of why it is thus rather than so. in that case i don't see why something physically impossible should be logically impossible.

your point is wrong. a physical law is a logical expression of a physical occurrence. which is why physical laws are possible only because they are logically possible. physics can 'not allow something' only according to some logic. no, it can't 'well turn out' otherwise. welcome to 2nd grade.

I have no idea what you mean. If growth of physics was a matter of logic, we could do everything a priori. Since it is not, we rely on things like constants of nature as well as logic and math. As far as i know, there are no known logical reasons for why these constants are the way they are.

in this way it is logical to suppose that they were otherwise. it is not physically possible to suppose they were otherwise, unless you postulate another physical theory where they actually can differ, say some multiverse theory.

just because we don't know all the laws yet, doesn't mean we can't. the science of physics is precisely figuring out more and more fundamental laws that explain the constants, and in the process more and more of these constants are becoming variables in these laws.

i didn't say we can't. i'm saying at this stage, best theory doesn't get you from physical to logical impossibility, so that's just a postulation on your part (hence the nobel prizes you'd be winning if you were correct)

it's not a distinction that can grow. "physics" is a subset of "logic", just like "modal logic". the trend is to expand the set "logic". i assume it is easier to expand on areas of applicability of logic that do not require physical evidence or complex mathematics.

Ok, so in some sense you believe physics is a subset of logic. Since you further think of set theory/mathematics as pretty much logic, then maybe you'd subscribe to something like the computational/information-view of the physical universe?

I actually like such views. I really like David Deutsch and say, Seth Lloyd. But i've always thought of this as a fringe view. And the realm of the logically possible is huuuge for Deutsch for instance, it includes pretty much anything that is consistent, even if it's impossible in this universe.

Let me just quote some things from his new book, because i'm such a fan of his. For instance, he says in his new book "the beginning of infinity" (an amazing read),

"And there are infinitely many logically possible laws of physics. If they were all instantiated in real universes – as has been suggested by some cosmologists, such as Max Tegmark – it would be statistically certain that our universe is exactly on the edge of the astrophysicist-producing class of universes."

"Evidently no such place as Infinity Hotel could exist in our universe, because it violates several laws of physics. However, this is a mathematical thought experiment, so the only constraint on the imaginary laws of physics is that they be consistent. It is because of the requirement that they be consistent that they are counter-intuitive: intuitions about infinity are often illogical."

Especially the tale about proof, where he argues that the notion of proof depends on the physical laws that are available:

"Turing initially set up the theory of computation not for the purpose of building computers, but to investigate the nature of mathematical proof. Hilbert in 1900 had challenged mathematicians to formulate a rigorous theory of what constitutes a proof, and one of his conditions was that proofs must be finite: they must use only a fixed and finite set of rules of inference; they must start with a finite number of finitely expressed axioms, and they must contain only a finite number of elementary steps – where the steps are themselves finite. Computations, as understood in Turing’s theory, are essentially the same thing as proofs: every valid proof can be converted to a computation that computes the conclusion from the premises, and every correctly executed computation is a proof that the output is the outcome of the given operations on the input."

"One of Turing’s conclusions was that almost all mathematical functions that exist logically cannot be computed by any program. They are ‘non-computable’ for the same reason that most logically possible reallocations of rooms in Infinity Hotel cannot be effected by any instruction by the management: the set of all functions is uncountably infinite, while the set of all programs is merely countably infinite.

Hence also – as the mathematician Kurt Gödel had discovered using a different approach to Hilbert’s challenge – almost all mathematical truths have no proofs. They are unprovable truths.

It also follows that almost all mathematical statements are undecidable: there is no proof that they are true, and no proof that they are false. Each of them is either true or false, but there is no way of using physical objects such as brains or computers to discover which is which. The laws of physics provide us with only a narrow window through which we can look out on the world of abstractions."

This is just a snippet of how he thinks. And he's not just some random crank. He was basically a pioneer of showing how quantum mechanics violated the universality of Turing machines. Sure he has some views that are on the fringe, but all the most talented people have that - that's the mindset that makes them extraordinary thinkers. Most of the people doing new things have this insanely abstract view of things. I'm just in awe whenever I think about it.

"There is a philosophy of mathematics called finitism, the doctrine that only finite abstract entities exist. So, for instance, there are infinitely many natural numbers, but finitists insist that that is just a manner of speaking. They say that the literal truth is only that there is a finite rule for generating each natural number (or, more precisely, each numeral) from the previous one, and nothing literally infinite is involved. But this doctrine runs into the following problem: is there a largest natural number or not? If there is, then that contradicts the statement that there is a rule that defines a larger one. If there is not, then there are not finitely many natural numbers. Finitists are then obliged to deny a principle of logic: the ‘law of the excluded middle’, which is that, for every meaningful proposition, either it or its negation is true. So finitists say that, although there is no largest number, there is not an infinity of numbers either.

Finitism is instrumentalism applied to mathematics: it is a principled rejection of explanation. It attempts to see mathematical entities purely as procedures that mathematicians follow, rules for making marks on paper and so on – useful in some situations, but not referring to anything real other than the finite objects of experience such as two apples or three oranges. And so finitism is inherently anthropocentric – which is not surprising, since it regards parochialism as a virtue of a theory rather than a vice.

it assumes that mathematicians have some sort of privileged access to finite entities which they do not have for infinite ones. But that is not the case. All observation is theory-laden. All abstract theorizing is theory-laden too. All access to abstract entities, finite or infinite, is via theory, just as for physical entities.

In other words finitism, like instrumentalism, is nothing but a project for preventing progress in understanding the entities beyond our direct experience. But that means progress generally, for, as I have explained, there are no entities within our ‘direct experience’.

The whole of the above discussion assumes the universality of reason. The reach of science has inherent limitations; so does mathematics; so does every branch of philosophy. But if you believe that there are bounds on the domain in which reason is the proper arbiter of ideas, then you believe in unreason or the supernatural. Similarly, if you reject the infinite, you are stuck with the finite, and the finite is parochial. So there is no way of stopping there. The best explanation of anything eventually involves universality, and therefore infinity. The reach of explanations cannot be limited by fiat."

no, there is no such 'philosophy of mathematics' (pukes), unless you count medieval clergy or orangutangs.
again, i feel embarrassed reading that. a baseless, circular regurgitation of brain diarrhea. i'm sorry someone polluted your brain in school and you probably payed for it.

i want to represent my brain, so i'm gonna leave the field for the wildest jumps/shifts/cuts my brain has to offer, this is gonna work to a certain degree.

you want to adapt a computer, with all the knowledge and logic, and all you gonna end up with is a poor 80's pc. everyone is so outdated the day that they were born. end of the story is you working as a shabby thesaurus program the rest of your life. :p

if those are valid, as i cited in those references, and there are plenty more, then it's not physically impossible.
if they are not valid, it still makes sense as an exercise, and if you can't see the point you shouldn't quibble about peripheral details like whether it's physically possible or not (or even logically impossible).

i already cited donald davidson as the originator of the swampman argument, one of the biggest philosophers of the last century who contributed a lot to the study of truth semantics. all these things are peripheral.

that you didn't like the thought experiment is fine. lets just end it. i tried to supply it to make further sense of the details of your position, but if you can't even see how it makes sense to bring it up at all in the context of our discussion, then we can just leave it at that.

training your brain is detached from the input. it's not that you're getting a higher level of intelligence out of reading something new. you're just talking about knowledge. i could read the same amount as a wall of text about mickey mouse or read a book about sexual perversions.
the situation when we meet on an issue where knowledge isn't sufficient, we gonna have equally prepared muscles.

i'm not saying it's incremental. i said historical. it's the study of the "evolution of intelligence." studying the origins of the actual instance of something is not the same as studying its essence. given that there exists theories that explain the essence of what intelligence is, these theories into specific ways it could evolve are relatively uninteresting, if your aim is to understand the essence of intelligence rather than the history of intelligence, among humans, animals, or whatever species on this earth.

that's kind of an argument from semantics, isn't it? what are the scientific theories that explain the essence of what intelligence is? certainly not a paper explaining how our cortex looks like in MRI when we are remembering a pizza place phone number. yes, it chips into the overall picture, which is great. but i think the formation of the neural network and understanding what tasks intelligence has evolved for sheds more light on what intelligence is, and probably helps a ton, and is going to be quotes a ton, in further studies on what intelligence is.

not saying that i said anything interesting, especially not as you haven't told us yet what should be considered interesting. if he thinks there is a lack of interesting posts in a discussion he is part of why not post what he finds interesting. at least he couldn't state that there is nothing interesting. interesting innit

also there is no point in posting something interesting or an idea in this topic, since you obviously want to ruin it. no problem, i'm gonna enjoy myself as always and try to annoy you guys a little more.

and btw i don't post stuff like this http://www.esreality.com/post/2243265/consciousness/#pid2248117
to make you look bad, i'm having fun taking you as a test subject. i actually forced you to be creative and use empathy, which according to my assumption you didn't get a lot and have to carry its counterpart to extremes(that's the whole dilemma of our arguments).

the point is i have to push the button to be rational, otherwise i wouldn't survive in my daily life(surviving might be your only argument to go this way), and i can, you seem incapable to do the same.

so don't care about someone finding something interesting in this thread, it's all relative.

i don't recall ever putting you on probation, which would only happen if you're violating any guidelines or affecting the site negatively, so no. By continuing to post drunk, you just potentially embarrassing your sober self.

huh? i'm not disputing the fact that I, in the wake, might have put you on probation. I didn't keep notes, but the only reasons would be if you're affecting the site negatively, which you are not, right now.

not drunk by the way. let's get back to my weird checklist. should i be embarrassed because of an assumption? we're getting directly to post #115 again. having a hard time bearing shame? is it that why it has such a high priority on your side, a fear? (laughing at someone who gets trolled, etc..)

i am not stating anything. i am just asking questions and i am looking for concrete answers from a logical mind.

is it too personal? are you maybe ashamed?

e: since i'm gonna go counting sheeps:

i'm just looking for a relation between "demiurge" and your real equivalent. since i have never really consciously seen you stating any emotion in any debate or similar (and the plussing to get plussed ratio :D; not counting any cynicism, sarcasm, etc..). and i'm asking myself is this depersonalisation just an online gimmick or is it worse?

you are like the consciousness, you not gonna reveal (at least not to me)by yourself what you are.

the facts we have (postcount, behavior, actions <-> existence, anatomy, intelligence, logics, etc..) are on the same level as our assumptions (playboy, loser, rich, poor <-> simple, complex, powerful, *wild theory, etc..), since they might be totally irrelevant for what you really are.

please don't forget that you are demiurge and you only know your own truth not the one of the consciousness

Ned Block is a famous philosopher, arguing for a the urgency of understanding "qualia" when most philosophers were still recovering from behaviorism and logical positivism.

Christof Koch (Paul Allen recently donated $500 Million to a project of his) who has been working forever with Francis Krick (nobel) as the scientific reductionists (who still take qualia seriously) par excellence in consciousness studies.

Guilio Tononi, neuroscientist who collaborated with Gerald Edelman, biologist (nobel) on a book called "A Universe Of Consciousness How Matter Becomes Imagination" has recently developed a tentative theory of consciousness based on a formal theory of information integration.

One of my motivations on starting this thread was the idea that, holy shit, according to the theory Tononi gives (which Koch claims is the most plausible theory yet), there are still a lot of extremely counter intuitive consequences. It's not like the paradoxes go away with a clear theory, they only bring them more forcefully into view.

So it's more of a "holy shit, something is *actually* wrong" than "i like consciousness and it's mysterious, therefore i *hope* something is wrong." I've been aware of consciousness as an outlier in scientific explanation since my pre-teen years, and yet only now am i beginning to take the paradoxes seriously, because even while removing some of the paradoxes, seeing what a plausible theory looks like brings many into sharper focus.

Ned Block quotes Nagel somewhere as saying that we're in a similiar position to the pre-einsteinians who wondered how matter and energy related. There are always going to be "deflationists," as philosophers call them, who reduce the unknown to the known in a questionable manner.

For instance the eliminative materialists. And the externalists about mental content. (for example look up Dennet/Churchland for the former, or Dretske/Lewis for the latter) When clever people adopt strange positions, there might really be something strange going on.

Wasn't that good really. But notice that the philosopher is the conservative one. The more empirically trained, the more outlandish their theories and thought experiments are. But i'm all with the radicals on this one. At least for the moment x)

since we know now that your argument A) is wrong and that "mind is a mirror" you should change your post back to your original post on how the neurons relate/consciousness, which was more open for discussion.

actually, i found someone had already made the argument* in an article "why nothing mental is just in the head" that was featured in the philosopher's annual (list of top ten papers each year) in 2007. *note that i am arguing for a kind of mental internalism in the thesis I am working on.

Just got off the phone with my girlfriend, bemoaning my current work (or lack there of) with regard to my thesis. Then I partially read this thread. The question I'm left with is: what's the fucking point?